Tag Archives: Jacob Rees-Mogg

The Select Committee on Exiting the European Union was formed in 2016 following the outcome of the EU referendum. Chaired by former International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, it is in many ways an outlier in the world of Commons committees. Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker discuss what makes it so unusual and analyse how it has operated since its inception.

The Select Committee on Exiting the European Union (the DExEU committee, or Brexit committee) is one of the most divided since the creation of departmental select committees. Select Committees usually operate on a consensual basis, and unanimous reports are regarded as carrying more weight. Most reports are agreed without divisions. But the DExEU committee has seen divisions – formal votes on reports or amendments – on each of its reports, and eurosceptic members produced an alternative draft report in March 2018.

Of the committee’s 21 members, 14 campaigned for Remain in the 2016 EU referendum: six Labour, four Conservative, two SNP, one Liberal Democrat and one Plaid Cymru (see Table 1 below). Seven voted Leave: six Conservatives and one DUP.

Voting on DExEU committee reports

The DExEU and the Northern Ireland select committees are the only ones in which the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) together have a majority. However, they have rarely been able to take advantage of this, because the DExEU committee is not divided primarily along party lines. Continue reading →

Politicians engage in a variety of local campaign strategies that they think will help them get re-elected, but they don’t really know if the money they spend works or not. Peter John explains how experiments conducted by politicians and researchers working in partnership can be a useful way of finding out what actually works in local campaigning.

Experiments are becoming very common these days as public agencies turn to randomised controlled trials to evaluate public policies. The Behavioural Insights Team, which was in the Cabinet Office, has blazed a trail by using trials to test for a range of innovations, such as getting income tax paid on time, collecting court fines, getting people into work, and improving education attainment, just to name a few of the recent applications. Despite this growing interest, one group of people doesn’t use experiments very much: the politicians, at least those in the UK.

Politicians want to get re-elected and they engage in a variety of local campaign strategies with the aim of improving their chances of doing so such as leafleting, e-mailing, door knocking, using social media, and buying space in newspapers. But they don’t really know if the money they spend generates votes in the ballot box. Politicians have been advised that they need to get information on the type of voters who support them so that they can target messages to them, or find their core or loyal voters to ensure that they turn out to vote. But looking at election results after spending the money does not tell them whether their campaigning worked or whether they would have won anyway. In contrast, experiments use randomisation to provide a fair comparison between doing nothing and carrying out an intervention.

The Constitution Unit in the Department of Political Science at University College London is the UK's leading research body on constitutional change.

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